Wardogs developer Bulkhead had some strong words to say about the rough launch of Season 2, admitting: "We f***ed up."
Season 2 saw the introduction of XP and cash bonuses for people willing to play Blue Team, in an attempt to polish Lonestar’s tarnished reputation.
Unfortunately, the idea backfired as more experienced players quickly boosted their accounts on Blue. Usually it takes a while for players to unlock some of the deadliest gear, but the XP and cash boosts saw players quickly kitted out in the best armor and the most annoying weapons.
"We were wrong, we f***ed up," Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer said. "This was an experiment — we thought we'd have this in for about a week.” The boosts have already been removed in a hotfix.
The cash and XP bonuses saw Blue Team go from the worst performing team to quickly dominating every match, attracting all the best players. The bonuses were 5% extra cash and 2.5% extra XP, but it was enough to attract the most try-hard players in the game.
"The only comment that annoyed me is when people say, 'They didn't address the core issues [with Blue Team]," Brammer continued, talking about team spawn placement. "Well, actually, we did rebalance the entire spawn setup for Bakurani, and we did test that out quite a lot and see that the difference had balanced out.
“We should have just stuck to our guns with that, really, but here we are — we tried, it didn't work, this is us holding our hands up."
Wardogs is still in Early Access so these kinds of teething issues are to be expected as the devs experiment and find the right balance for the 1.0 release. The game exploded in terms of sales, and the developers have been scrambling to keep up with its popularity since.
Bulkhead also had to contend with making sure Wardogs works on consoles, where the game will eventually land in 1.0. The developer already admitted to having to hold back Wardogs features to make sure it’ll run on Xbox Series S.
Wardogs Season 2 also introduced a new rain system that impacts gameplay. Players have to really cock their heads to pick up footsteps, and visibility for pilots is drastically reduced.